Long ago, when I joined Vertical Leap, this was a simple SEO question with a simple answer. Back then, we hated Flash because search engines could not read the text in Flash files and could not follow links.
This changed in 2008 when Adobe worked with Google and Yahoo to allow search engines to spider and index the contents of Flash files and in 2008 Google announced Flash indexing
So it must be all good now to use Flash then? Well… No. I still don’t like it. Here’s my 3 reasons why I don’t like to rely on Flash navigation or text content – at least without having an alternative non-Flash version:
1.) Great so Google can index Flash – Bing can’t though
2.) Neither can the tools I use to create an XML sitemap!
3.) An increasing proportion of internet surfing is done via iPhones and iPads and so do not have Flash support so if your website navigation is via Flash and you haven’t developed a non-Flash version of the site, then your potential clients are going to bounce straight off your site as they won’t be able to navigate it.
Solution – well I would prefer dumping the Flash. However, being constructive, I would suggest including an alternative text based navigation for the non Google search engines. You could also use Javascript to detect whether the browser supports Flash, and if not, like Safari on an iPhone, show a different version of the site. And yes, iPhones do support javascript.
Yes I agree with your post. Flash still creates difficulties while optimising a site. I also give the suggestions to the web designers that if you want to make flash based sites then apply it on home page and add some other linked pages of your site under the flash whom which any SEO can optimise.